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106382-treatise-pve-systems-improvements
Page 1, Page 2 Content ---- ---- ---- I bet you tell all the ladies that. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- 0mm or flavoured? | |} ---- You don't have to be a devil's advocate to bring up holes; that's why I wrote it in the first place. To whit: 1. That could be an issue. I could recommend a few possible remedies. The first of these is to put in a sliding limit, say that every elder gem you get within an hour, it reduces the drop rate in favor of money by 25% (going by the example here; I'm only using 5 an hour as a basis for discussion, not calling at out as the number). That might be somewhat complicated. Another might be a direct elder gem -> plat conversion. That way, if you REALLY need an infusion of cash and this elder gem limit removal has wiped out your income, you can swap gems for currency on some kind of limited basis (or not). There may simply need to be a limit to how much cash can be made this way; though that's up for debate. At least then elder gems will NEVER become useless, even if you max your character, because they can be exchanged for in-game money. 2. This I suppose will have to be changed. I love the game's lore, of course, so I actually did have this in the back of my mind. For my part, I think for the betterment of guild functions, if all else fails, I feel we should modify the lore so that all the quests can be taken at once. That may require some overdubbing in the voice acting and some serious ramifications for changing the way the story through attunement flows, but I feel it's necessary to avoid the problem of cohesion. In the grand scheme of things, I think it would be worth it. If nothing else, though, at the very least we should run the "grindier" bits concurrently, vet dungeons, vet adventures, the 10 raid bosses, the rep grind (if that isn't already done; by that point in the process it should be), etc. Or, it might be possible just to keep track of who has silvers in what, how many world bosses have been killed, and you could leave attunement in the tiered program it is in. You would simply move someone on to the next step if they'd already completed it. That way, once someone hits the medal requirement in all vet dungeons, if they've already silvered in them, they'll immediately be able to complete it. This may be the superior system if it can be tracked effectively. 3. You wouldn't be able to skip content in the system (I'd mentioned that you would take a dock to the medal count for every enemy that isn't fodder that you skip, forcing you to full clear content for medals), but the rest is a fair point. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to exclude the top damage (I am assuming that the amount of overall damage is being tuned per-dungeon). Another option my friend recommended was to individually check "class roles", I.E. DPS are judged by the amount of DPS they do, healers judged by the amount of healing, minus overhealing, they do, and tanks are judged by their relative threat holding. This seems a more complicated system, but I should mention it. I think it's important to come up with the best metric for checking group PVE content. I just think timers are a quickly implemented, but ultimately self-defeating, way to judge PVE efficiency, for just the reason you mentioned. It rewards skipping content, bugs, etc, not necessarily the ability to effectively kill things without dying in a group. Any feedback or suggestions you have are more than welcome. | |} ---- So, very quickly, this would be one example of a "veteran leveling zone". We were discussing the idea a while ago, and this was meant to be a running example. So, to whit: Once every few hours (we'll call it three to six), an alarm sounds throughout everyone on a faction signalling this event is underway. In this case, Deadeye reports in that the Darkspur Cartel has launched a direct invasion of Exile holdings in Algoroc, and that they are calling for all people to come. Groups, individuals, partial groups, even raids can queue simultaneously by running to Thayd or their house and initiating a teleport to the level 50 version of Algoroc, which has opened (in reality, a phased version of Algoroc). Upon arrival, Deadeye and other Exile leaders are holding Gallow, but barely. After five minutes (to allow the shard to fill), they are attacked on all sides by large groups of solo, prime, and five man enemies. These must be handled, because if the town is overrun, the event is over. However, the waves will not stop coming just by killing the enemies. The waves are being teleported in by a set of transporters, with a nearby dish array coordinating. To destroy one, a team must run out, destroy the landers (they are stationary five man bosses) and then someone must disconnect the dish arrays by climbing to the tops of rocks and alcoves (a good thing to have explorers on hand for). There are several of these to destroy and, when destroyed, the event moves to the next phase. Deadeye surmises that they will need to push the Darkspur out of their holdings at the Crowe Family Homestead and Grim's Lumber Mill, though their main assault force landed in Demonclaw Pass. He starts with the Crowe Family Homestead, by sending the teams out to retake Tremor Ridge. Roaming packs of mobs are setting up to try to assault Gallow again, so there is a limited time in which to get to Tremor Ridge. A ten man boss is at the far end of town, holding the population hostage. After freeing them and fighting your way to the center of town, you have completed the next stage, and turn the Darkspur artillery over the ridge and begin firing on the Crowe Family Homestead. This phase requires more individual coordination. The Crowe Family Homestead is pounding on targets in Tremor Ridge as they are hit back. The players split into two teams, those that are repairing and trying to augment the Tremor Ridge defenses, and those that are trying to run into Crowe Holdings, destroy their artillery, demolish their defenses, and open the next phase. At the end, a Crowe Family associate, a 20 man boss, appears and challenges the players. This represents a "checkpoint", Gallow is now safe and Tremor Ridge is secure. The players are now sent to the Lumber Mill, and engage in a holdout while attempting to build a fire base from which to assault the Lumber Mill. Darkspur Sappers are continually running towards the base, trying to undo the players work as they run back and forth, building defenses. Building guns means that they can use these against the sappers and other mobs. Building the shield generator means the sappers do less damage, etc. Finally, when the base is finished, the assault on the lumber mill begins. This is more group oriented, as groups of five man teams need to fight hard bosses to stop the munitions construction and to free enslaved Exile citizens. When the Lumber Mill bases have been destroyed, another 20 man boss is spawned, and must be killed. This secures the Lumber Mill. All this time, the fire base must be protected and, if it's damage, rebuilt, or it returns to this step and must be rebuilt again. Having destroyed the Mill, the players are informed that Demonclaw Pass has been turned into a veritable fortress, and players must essentially wander into an open-air raid, a giant maze of switches for laser gates that open into new areas, of bosses that need to be killed all the way up to 20 man bosses that require other teams that followed a different path to disable their raid-wiping abilities. For example, there could be a 20 man boss who, as he is engaged, starts a holdout on four rocket launchers above. If the enemies get to a launcher uncontested, they begin firing them at the raid below that is fighting the boss. If the players clear the wave first, they can steal the rocket from that wave's leader and fire the rocket at the boss, doing more damage. Things like that should make up this last phase. At the end is a very hard 40 man open air raid boss which may require some external work, but is mostly the boss everyone descends on to keep him from retaking the rest of Algoroc. His killing signals the end of the event. Everyone is rewarded with a large amount of elder gems, money, and/or other rewards like boom boxes or gear in Gallow. Gallow then phases back into normal Algoroc. It was one example, with only a few details, of what I was talking about. It would mean less "new" content would have to be generated, but it's still a large development project. I'm aware it might take time to implement. It's easier than having to create an entirely new zone, though, as they could reuse the zone already in existence. | |} ---- I'm assuming overall damage takes into account the amount of damage that can be expected in a raid due to unavoidable telegraphs. They would be tuned per instance. You may be right that it's too simple to judge tanks and different armor classes, though it can be modified, as I've enumerated above. It was just the most simple idea to replace an overall timer, which I don't think does a good job of checking PVE skill. I'm not averse to other metics being discussed. | |} ---- The attunement isn't there just to get in your way of raiding... it's also trying to tell a but of a story. So clumping the attunement objectives up into one big pile would make it feel more absolutely like... a gate. And more of a grind. I think they need to remain ordered as it is. | |} ---- ---- ---- Would it be preferable to have an elder gem "soft cap" that can be exceeded by things like veteran dungeons, raids, et al? I simply think having elder gems, and as you suggested more tangible rewards for those elder gems, as awards for content would encourage more gameplay than the hard cap, which discourages gameplay after the cap for the most part. | |} ---- How would it make it feel like more of a grind? You'd get stuff done way faster if it could be done concurrently. Are you suggesting that the little tiny tidbits and gimmicky quests (like the heist and mech mission on dom side) take away from the grind or mask the gate? It is a gate, let it be a gate, I just think it needs some quality of life improvements to let guilds get more people through it that didn't do it all as a group at launch. I don't see how doing adventures, rep, dungeons and world bosses concurrently couldn't be one big step. You could still have story elements along the way. Plus there a plenty of other ways they could choose to tell that story. Many people are stuck on one part of the attunement for so long anyways that they likely have forgotten what the previous story elements were. Many others don't honestly don't care about the story and just want to get into raids. | |} ---- I think it would be preferable if the economy were to be relatively the same where some players currently push their gem cap so they get an extra bit of gold from doing whatever they do and for some reason or another that is their primary income. If you were to completely remove the cap though then I feel as though other sources of income like vendoring, trash from monsters, and quest rewards, etc that would be effected by the current system should be boosted to at least place the players income level at relatively the same baseline. If it wasn't for currency being connected as it is I would say just remove the cap though. I think then it would almost be like the heroic badge system we had in burning crusade(i never played beyond that expansion so i don't know if it changed significantly) which I actually liked a lot. | |} ---- I'm not opposed to capping gems from certain sources or doing a direct gem-to-cash at the vendor. I think we're on the same page, it's just in application. Considering I've spent the better part of the last month or so leveling a pair of alts (mainalts?) I haven't had any issues with money. Which of those two options would be better? Having a set limit on how many gems you can earn from dailies and points in a week and then turning that into cash, but allowing things like extra vet dungeons and adventures to award them beyond the cap (the more complicated option, I think), or just having a way to turn elder gems directly into game currency at a roughly reasonable level (the easy way for the devs)? | |} ---- I think the idea of retroactive quest completion for the grindier bits should work fine in solving this problem. That means you can still do the major story quests in order (those don't seem to be what people are complaining about) but if you've silvered vet dungeons when you get that link in the quest, you can automatically complete it. That way, you can work on those parts even while not "having" the quest. It would be a bit like the reputation grind; all they'd need to do is keep track of how many world bosses you've killed, vet dungeons and adventures you've gotten silver in, etc. Those seem to be where people are getting annoyed. I haven't heard anyone complain yet about the kitschy arkship quests, those seem to be fine for the playerbase unless I simply haven't been informed otherwise. | |} ---- Yeah that would be totally fine. I don't have an issue with the arkship quests themselves, I just don't think they justify making the entire process linear for the sake of telling a story. Not saying a story can't, or shouldn't, be told - just saying there is a better way to do it that would also streamline the attunement process. | |} ---- If Carbine ever feels it's necessary to put in attunement at this scale again, I would completely agree they need to make it, storywise, all part of one story. That old Ony attunement questchain was awesome back in the day, but I don't think the modern community appreciates that kind of thing anymore. It might be best if any future "attunement" was only in the form of story quests to set up the encounter. If we need to be skillchecked again, I would advise that the check happen all concurrently. But that's far in the future. For now, I think it would be best if the skillcheck portions were retroactively counted (because you've been checked) for the sake of guild integrity and logistics. The actual "quest" portions that would remain linear seem to be the more "popular" portions. At the very least, I don't hear them being complained about. I would appreciate any feedback from raid guild leaders on how to simplify the process since they are, at heart, who these changes are meant for. Except the gear stuff. That's all us. :) | |} ---- Oh stop it. ;) Social problems They start immediately upon getting off the arkship and last through leveling. Show of hands: How many people still have 5+ quest tasks in your journal? Awesome! How many are on the same server? Work that out among yourselves. See what I did there? We need a realm wide party finder system similar to FFXIVs. We need some way to grouo up for open world content besides shouting in Zone. | |} ---- I remember one of the twitch streams mentioning that the future attunements would be more story quest based, and less horrific than the current one. That being said the old Ony attunment, particularly Bolvar's march in Stormwind was probably one of my favorite moments in the game. | |} ---- ---- That might be an issue for people who aren't on Evindra. You would like some sort of global LFG channel? | |} ---- I agree. It was so epic. I also agree with Carbine's analysis. You only need to be skillchecked for raids once. I assume once you've done the first attunement, the other attunments should all be story based. | |} ---- It's a hard call for me to say in terms of how easy it would be to implement either, because I'm not sure how Carbines coding is done. Though if I were to pick based on a general guess as to which would be easier to do it'd be the latter as you're essentially removing code that just places the limiter and IF they wanted to they could also add a "money bag" item as a purchase to compensate for what a player would have gotten roughly doing dailies capped, which I think would be reasonable. It wouldn't be too much to outdo CREDD(might actually make CREDD more valuable since people would possibly have more gold to spend if they constantly buy money bags), but it'd be enough that if you really wanted to grind for gold you could while having the option to either exchange the gems for gear or for a small bit of gold. So the latter perhaps , might be better... An actual Global LFG channel would be awesome. I would say use advice and or trade which I believe are global, but I don't like misusing a channel... | |} ---- ---- I mean just because you're not in the zone doesn't mean you have nothing to do with it. I should be able to find people to do Open World content Realm wide. I see these poor Exiles shouting for things like Refrigerator Raiders or big game hunting for 30 minutes. When there could be someone bored in Thayd sitting around thinking "Boy I wish I had someone to do these quests with" Same for dailies. Man if there were an LFP for dailies NO ONE would solo! Can you imagine it? Think about it. Log in prime time pull up LFP, join a daily party BAM! Game just got social. | |} ---- Can't remove attunement imo.....there needs to be a skill-check for raids of this difficulty. Removing it would be a nightmare for guilds trying to build competent raid teams. | |} ---- The skill-check is killing the raid boss. I very much doubt it'll be worse than the current system. | |} ---- I'll add that in as the recommended suggestion, then. Also, it'd help if there was an LFG channel. At least it would be better than clogging up the advice or trade channels. The more people in the looking for group channel, the better it usually is, even if they're just shooting the shit. I don't think any of that is really necessary. Not only is that extreme, I'm not sure it's as effective as the proposal. Normalizing gear and crafting gear isn't going to be as useful as integrating crafting more wholly into the endgame. Otherwise, you will always have to balance whether crafting gear is easier (the people who think the game is P2W) or whether crafting has been marginalized (thus making it useless). Having crafters craft the gear but having content items activate it seems a better proposal that keeps money circulating in the game, keeps crafting useful, but doesn't give people with money a complete unfair advantage. Attunement is necessary for skillchecking for raids, but more to the point, as it's been said, if you can't complete attunement because you can't put together a steady group/can't complete a silver medal veteran dungeon/can't even stick with something that might take more than a few hours to attain, you are going to drag down a raiding guild. Raiding guilds should help get you there, but having someone in your guild who doesn't like failing at something and not being able to move on, or someone who doesn't want to put in the work for the gear that's dropping, is always a big mistake. And I would not inflict those people on a raid when drops are in play. Attunement should be easy enough, I'm only trying to make it less bureaucratically dense. I definitely don't think it should be removed for any reason. It serves a purpose. I would prefer to see drops kept on the medal bag circuit, added to elder gem vendors, and not see any open drops at all. Elder gem grinding being able to buy things you aren't getting are fine. I have no problem with extra abilities taking some time and work to win. People should not be done developing their characters so soon after hitting 50. Then we'd have a major problem, one Carbine couldn't fix so easily, people literally being done with everything in the game and quitting over content. Hadcore or casual, that is the worst of situations. | |} ---- ---- I don't get this point at all. Could you elaborate? The problem with that proposal is that it's just more bloat added on top of an already unbalanced jenga tower. Besides, if player retention is as much of a problem as it seems, then there's not time for a whole new crafting system created from scratch. My proposals are blunt and simple, they can use a machete on the chaff instead of a scalpel (or a makeover). I've seen this bandied about many times, but I've yet to see a compelling argument of why it should be the case. Raid guilds in other games have killed many extremely hard bosses before without prerequisite attunements, that should be proof enough that's it's not a requirement. We're already there for a whole lot of people since raiding is off-limits for them, and everything silver dungeons and beyond is part of the 'raid-scene', so to speak. | |} ---- ---- Answers above in red are mine. | |} ---- A few suggestions to run by you: Should stats provide diminishing returns, encouraging people to spend points in multiple different stats to maximize damage? That would make it somewhat easier to deal with crafted gear filling in gaps and might answer the point of everyone dumping points into assault power. Should the bolded portion act as the tiers for any gear changes, so that people can move through more reliable levels of content knowing they are sufficiently geared? Would you think it might be better if the elder gems were the other way around (though I'm not necessarily saying your method of distribution would be incorrect, or that the prices shouldn't be increased or decreased to tune to it correctly) and that maybe open world drops of the amp/ability points should be removed and instead the elder gems would become a more consistent method of progressing your character post-50? And, would this be better if another currency was introduced, such as bags at the end of veteran runs and raids drop another kind of gem and elder/new kind of gems are required to get your amps/ability points? I think that might be a bit more consistent as far as drops go. | |} ---- I did mention some things at the end for people who won't be raiding (and to give people things to do). I know veteran shiphands are already on their way. I'd also like to say built fabkits and extra content are always great to have, and it is the inevitable cure for the game's problems. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- This is from your OP to highlight what I mean by 'bloat' (the jenga tower simile I admit is probably not completely on the nose, what I mean is that it's already a complicated system with many interacting parts. Adding even more on top is going to be potentially very problematic). You have a new type of item, the "activator unit", this needs to be interactable with a new type of crafted "inert" gear with use restrictions. This needs to be implemented for every class, for every gear slot. So you need to rework crafting, add new recipes for crafting or change the current ones, add a new type of item and insert it into all the different loot tables, add a new mechanic to work activating the gear in, then of course you need to balance it. What do you do when you want to implement this system on different item tiers? Make tiered tokens? But the gear stats have already been implemented on the 'locked' items. So what do you do then, scale the stats? How about rune slots? Will crafters still be able to craft without using the tokens? If not, people will be mad because it's a new form of gate and tokens are bop. If they are, tokens are just a roundabout way of adding a new tier of crafting (already implemented by the new technologist research tree), and will bloat the amount of items in the crafting tree (2 types for every item, token and non-token). So that needs resolving too. How much time will that take to implement? Several months at the very least. Will the change be perfectly balanced and bug free? Possible, but not likely. It might as well end up causing more problems. Meanwhile, what does it really solve? Crafting is a bit more fun? Well, I'll grant you that, but that's an issue that can be solved in other ways. Stat allocation is still un-optimal causing muddied item progression between the tiers. The other example is basically admitting the problem is what I said above (un-optimal stat allocation) in a roundabout way, but using a needlessly complex system to solve it. Here's analyzing what would need to done with my example (standardizing main stat and grit): You'll need to rework every PvE drop from at least level 45+. This is a lot of work obviously, but with a standardized system it's easy to allocate stats. Adventure blues x1 main stat, y1 grit, adventure epics x2 main stat, y2 grit, dungeon blues x3 main stat, y3 grit etc. Other stats would just need to be tweaked in accordance with the item level, and grit replaced with another stat on items with grit already allocated. That is literally all the work required (edit: as long as they have an idea of what class each item is designed for, which I hope they have) Standard amount of runes based on item quality/ilvl is already coming, and changing all slots to omni should be very simple, and boom, you have my rune system suggestion done as well. | |} ---- I think you've overestimated the amount of gear you'd need to have at hand. However, I highly doubt it couldn't be applied to all crafted gear as it is in one fell swoop, since it was already part of the crafting dynamic. All that needs to happen is that high level crafting gear be made to need a token to make it work and to increase the output from the core. More importantly, as it is, you DO need different armor and gear for every single slot. Every heavy hand slot needs to have a set of stats for both classes, all builds, every tier, every drop-worth of content. And that is ALL in the drop rotation. The specifics of people's issues seem to revolve around how hard it is to get the gear you need to drop, and this fixes that because a heavy hand token, as a drop, covers both classes and all builds. That's why crafters are so important to this solution, because the normalized system you're proposing means every single class and every single build needs its own piece of gear (it's hard coded). So if a tanking warrior chest drops for a DPS warrior, it's useless unless they're intentionally building a tanking set. Crafters, on the other hand, can build you exactly what you want. That seems to be a great system and people don't mind it, save that it doesn't reward people for running the content right now, it rewards them for having money. This would solve that, make sure that more useful "drops" come, that you can get exactly the stats you want instead of hoping for a drop. And it does make crafting more fun as a bonus to that. Everyone gets a better system this way. I imagine it wouldn't take that long to implement. Recall, they don't have to worry about drop lists from every boss, they don't have to change listing unless they're removing other gear, all they have to do is add the tokens and they cover everything (and you need less of them, since a heavy hand token covers all potential BIS pieces at that tier for that class, which would otherwise be covered by four or more pieces of individual gear). The part that would take time would be coding into the gear that the item is BOE, cannot initially be worn, and the token makes it wearable and soulbinds it. I can't say I have any inside information on how difficult the system would be to code, but I wouldn't think it would be a four month project. I can't imagine it taking that long, and from that point on it makes all the work a lot easier to deal with since you don't need to go through changing every single hardline set of stats for every piece of gear at endgame. I do think it's far more efficient. The second option is a more complex coding issue and it is more complicated for the players (since it disallows the CX as a means of moving gear), but I included it for discussion regardless because, after it is coded and built, it would the require nothing else to be changed. That may, how Carbine coded the original client, be easier than either of our other proposals. | |} ---- Thanks! I appreciate the vote of confidence. I should point out that, in another thread, I did say the phrase "tear through the female Draken population like a testosterone-fueled Cassian chainsaw." :unsure: | |} ---- Dispelling the myth that is the first sentence is the first part of jumping off the attunement band-wagon. Wildstar doesn't represent a paradigm change in the world of challenging raiding, you just have a bit more creative red circles and larger arenas, generally. Also, there's no way of knowing what 40 main requires because no one's killed anything there yet (since the first boss is supposedly unkillable/bugged). Meanwhile, what I can say for certain is that attunement is a massive *cupcake* for raid guilds - and by extension, the game - with regards to player retention. | |} ---- I understand that. I was simply thinking that the elder gem system could be used, instead of a backup, as a primary means of getting the items since it can be controlled a bit better than the pure drop rate. I think that's why I was especially interested in your idea that, instead of drop rates for elder gems, they are hard coded to directly, on a sort of one-to-one basis, to reward people for their content. It might make it easier to tune if they could just increase the prices, but also increase the amount of gems you get from content. Tiered gearing might also help by giving people more to get and do, especially since coding the systems seems to be the most difficult part of the proposals laid out here. Once in place, they make putting gear in a lot easier. That way, you don't just have one tier of the best crafting gear to get, then you run out of things to do. You can get and replace gear faster and feel like you're being rewarded, even if you're not really moving that far forward in any absolute terms. | |} ---- ---- Well, considering that the top tiered raiding guilds are the ones calling the boss unkillable/bugged, and they came from hard mode raiding guilds in other games, I wouldn't think there are many other games with harder raid content, especially at 40. Regardless, I am attempting to help guilds with their attunement issues. No guild leader yet has complained about the actual linear quests, they mostly are complaining because they get so many people on different stages of attunement that they have to help almost individually. That becomes a major issue, the fact that you might have 2 people on adventures, 4 on silver dungeons, 3 on world bosses, and more on the other various quests, and you can only help some of those individuals at a time. Retroactive quest completion, especially for people who've, say, just been helping a guild group get silvers and suddenly get into that branch and have to do it again for themselves, would solve quite a few issues. Removing attunement seems like a quick, easy answer, but considering how much of an issue it is getting people with enough average skill in PUGs right now for veteran dungeons, I'd say there's ample evidence right now that there are plenty of people who simply don't have the skill for raiding yet. Attunement does check them for skill. To be fair, though, I think you should only be checked once with this kind of grind. The one for 40 that requires you to just get a bunch of recipes (someone estimated earlier that it takes 1400 platinum to buy someone through the attunement process) can be taken completely out or replaced with a simpler quest. THAT is a pointless attunement. I think it's just good to reward people for running the 5 mans in a tangible way that the current drop/crafting system doesn't. I think they might kill two birds with one stone this way. I'm not sure if it's the MOST pressing problem of the things I'm talking about, considering there are a few solutions and we simply don't know what is actually going to help most right now. I like to think it's a good candidate, though. A lot of people complain about gearing through dungeons, through crafting, and not being rewarded well enough for running the actual content. I was simply trying to address as much as possible at once. | |} ---- Well, we do all hope there's more vanity content in the game. A couple piece of mount flair and exclusive costume and housing items go a long way to giving people stuff to do if they don't want to raid (or between raids). | |} ---- ----